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Tag: Our Journey

An old colleague and I were having breakfast this morning when he looked up at the news (I can’t remember which network …MSNBC, I think) and noticed a split screen of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. He lamented long about how terrible both candidates are in this election and I guess we just have to choose the lesser of the two evils or, as he put it, “…put on a blindfold and just pick. It doesn’t really make any difference.”

And that’s when I went off.

I am really sick and tired of people saying both candidates are equally horrible choices, how much America thoroughly hates both of them to the core, that there’s not a single positive trait in either one of them and wow, if only we had voted for that guy behind the deli counter or the neighbor’s cat, America would be WAY better off.

A few days ago a friend of ours interviewed us for her book on patriarchal hierarchies. Because with three kids and the whole shibam there’s really no spare time for special decor – and also because at times raw can just be beautiful – here’s the uncut, raw version of her transcript, some of it will appear in print next year. We really enjoyed t as it went far and beyond the usual focus on sailing which we’ve had during most other interviews.

Dini – “All of our friends started climbing the career ladder getting into mortgages and the possession hierarchy and we felt that wasn’t really our plan. We had to do what felt right in our hearts and what we valued most.”

Dini – “With a family even more so we felt that’s what we have to show our children – not something that society might say you should do, as in getting the house and a mortgage and a ‘proper job’. That really didn’t resonate with us.”

Pablo – “In my case I also wanted to do something completely different. You only live once and you have to give it a go for your wildest dreams.”

Background summary, Dini – Left Australia when oldest child was almost 2 and the now middle one was a couple of months old. Sold everything, ended house lease, resigned from jobs.

Pablo – “Those are the things an adventure brings. Getting to the unknown and doing things that you’ve never done before. For me, it’s all about the feelings from the trip – buying a boat, going to amazing places. These were the highlights.”

Dini – “I think you need to be prepared that whatever your dream or adventure is, you need to want it so much in your heart that it’ll push you through very low moments, because they will come for sure.”

Dini – “The obvious highlights are a typical amazing sunny day with a nice breeze and you set off to an unknown island and ideally you make some new friends.”

Pablo – “For me I’ll always remember and I’ll always miss: waking up anchored in some beautiful bay. And the first thing I’d do is to jump in the water, as my coffee to wake me up. How amazing is that! Jumping in the water, that’s how I started my day. It cannot be a bad day because it started in the best way.”

Dini – “I’d swim to the beach, do my yoga, go for a run… and a couple of times I’d come across these ruins, especially in Turkey, that in Australia would be THE national monument because they were so beautiful, so well maintained and so OLD – but because there’s so many of them it’s not even a tourist attraction… just those moments that you totally don’t expect.”

Dini – “When you get a beautiful sail and you’re in tune with the wind and the waves, just with nature. It’s sounds quite romantic actually, you always live in tune with nature when you live on a boat. But a part of it can be quite exhausting, because if you get a few days of strong winds you might not be able to get off the boat or you’re restricted in what you can do next. But when it aligns it can be really beautiful as well. And of course the sunrises and sunsets at sea….

P – “When we were in the middle of the Med, crossing for example from Malta to Turkey, at some point it’s just water. You don’t see land anywhere. You don’t see boats. It’s just your little boat in the middle of the ocean. And you know underneath you there’s nothing but 10km of water. You feel humble, like you’re such a little thing in the world.”

D- “And at the same time empowering because you have to be so self-sustainable. All our energy came from wind and solar (except when we had to run the diesel engine) – that’s how our kids understand it. You are your own little world. You need to make sure you have enough food. We made our own water through osmosis. It’s very scary and adventurous but at the same time very empowering and very humbling. Wildlife is always another big highlight. You don’t feel like a superior human species, as we often think when we live in a city. We’re not.”

P – “You realise when you go back to normal civilisation, in a country like Australia, we have it so easy. We take everything for granted: water, electricity, food, shelter. It makes you appreciate little things in life. I think that’s why we have some sort of crisis in our time because we just don’t appreciate a lot of things that we take for granted.”

D – “Also having time… on the boat, so often we would just sit there as a family, we might read, we might play games, we might talk, we might just sit there – that’s something you never do in land life. I don’t know any family that just sits in the garden and spends time together. People are always rushing.”

D – “It’s like the ocean: the waves of the ocean slow you down, and you’re forced to adjust to it. Maybe at the beginning you fight it and you still want to do a thousand things, and then after a while you have to give in because it’s the rhythm of nature.”

P – “Most people are scared to follow their dreams.”

P – “People create their own prisons. You are a prisoner of your own freedom. I think it’s about liberating yourself from your own prison. Your own baggage plays a big part of that. It’s a mental game.”

D – “To put things into perspective, they say there are about 10,000 live-aboard sailing boats out there at any one time of those just 1% are families – so there’s only about 100 families cruising the world like we did. So we were nuts!”

P – “Me being from Argentina – having instability is normal. That is what I got from my parents; they were in some bad economic situations but they showed me you can always get up and come back.”

D – “People slide into a mortgage because in our culture you need to own your own house. The way people talk is that the bigger the house you have, the more you must have achieved or the cleverer you must be.”

P – “Society is telling you that if you want to climb the hierarchy and you want to be at the top, you have to have a lot of material possessions. You need to have the big house and your wife needs to drive the latest 4-wheel drive BMW/Mercedes.”

D – “It definitely does exist, this hierarchy, especially in terms of possessions – but there is always the option to opt out. Maybe because we grew up in different cultures, it’s easier for us to step out and see that, that you don’t have to buy into it.”

D – “I’ve got three kids, I don’t have the energy to start a Che Guevara-style revolution. But I feel that it’s a silent revolution just being a living example that you can live a different life, rather than aggressively fighting against it.”

P – “I think a lot of people are realising that there’s nothing there in possessing, or climbing up the ladder in the corporate world, or trying to get the mortgage for the biggest house. I think a lot of people like us can see there’s emptiness there and it’s not going to fulfil your spirit.”

D – “People have realised there’s limits with possessions. They don’t really make you happy.”

D – “The more people have, the more fear they have of losing it. The less material stuff you have, the more you can just go with the flow of life and see where it takes you. And get all these wonderful surprises that otherwise you’d miss out on.”

P – “If you get rid of material things that you don’t actually need, you will feel freedom somehow, you will feel lighter with more options.”

D – “For example, we bought a boat with a relatively low budget compared with many other sailing families and we never worried about getting robbed – and our lock didn’t even work properly. Whereas we have quite a few friends who have boats worth 15 times as much as our boat, and talking to them I felt they actually enjoyed their experience much less than us because they were always worried about people kidnapping their kids or stealing things from their boat. So in a way it was freeing living on a boat that always looked like the poorest in the

It’s not about pretty pictures in the sparkling Sea today. I have been speaking more to a friend lately who has been saving refugees in the Mediterranean for the past few years. She goes out on NGO funded boats. They wait 12 nm off the coast of Libya from where they can help whichever boats make it to them. The totally overfilled boats include many young babies, pregnant women and unaccompanied children ten years up.

Then there’s me sitting on the other side of the world, surrounded by so much affluence that people get depressed not knowing what to do with all that stuff in their multi-million dollar flats in Bondi and surroundings. What has happened to this world? How could we get to such a state of injustice and unbalance? Why are so many still focusing on separation rather than union? At the end of it we are all one and the same energy, come from the same place, live on the same Earth and are headed for the same direction: A very uncertain future.

Gazing beyond the boundary of my pretty Bondi bubble, it really gets to me how as a human race can we allow for so much suffering still to happen – much of it self-induced by us humans ourselves. Why are there helpless refugees still having to die so cruelly the way these two survivors (of 500 on their boat who drowned) retell in the below TED talk?

It feels overwhelming. I keep spreading the word of yoga on, but more importantly off the mat as I strongly believe it is part of the solution towards a more peaceful and just planet. I’ll also get on to at least one or two of Melissa Flemings (communications for UN Refugee Commission) 8 suggested practical ways to do something:

As we are enjoying sharing our story and inspiring others at the Sydney International Boatshow this weekend, we often get asked on what boat we’ll go for next time we set off into the sunset. Well, here’s one which dear friends of ours have just put on the market after calling her home for ten years and sailing all the way around the world with Sea Topaz. In fact, the lovely British couple living on it are a friend’s parents and sort of adopted us as cruising parents and mentors over the years. Why not shoot them out a massive thank you here, Duncan and Ria, it wouldn’t have been the same without you!

Sea Topaz for Sale

If you wanna check out their incredibly well designed and immaculately well kept and looked after Callisto 435, go no further than here. Had she been on the market when we were looking, and had we been able to stretch our budget enough, we’d definitely would have gone for her.

The other way we often think of them these days is when parents of older children ask us if they should go, despite all their mental ‘buts’, such as “but my daughter is getting married soon.” … “but I’ve got a grand-son on the way.”… “but my parents are getting older.” Just breathe out the buts with your next full and complete exhale. With your next deep inhale into the belly space, manifest your dream and make it come true TODAY, as tomorrow might be too late.

Moreover, Duncan and Ria come to show that living your dream is the most important thing a parent can do to inspire their kids to do the same. Their son and great friend of our’s, after also sailing half way around the world several years ago, is now building his own, totally sustainable straw house for himself and his family in New Zealand. You can follow the detailed steps of his inspirational project on his blog. We can’t wait to visit them to hopefully help set up a permaculture backyard with chickens and children flopping happily about.